Biography

Melissa Gawlowski hails from Hell, Michigan and currently resides in Brooklyn. Her New York credits include: Spring Tides (Boomerang Theatre Company; also Cardboard Box Collaborative, Philadelphia; Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska), True (as part of Hall Pass with Blind Spot Collective); The Frankophile (City Attic Theatre), The Incredible Journey (Boomerang Theatre Company's Rock ‘N’ Roles), Release (Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival, Full Circle Theatre Company, National AATE/ATHE Conference), The Cellar (5th Annual Festival of Samhain; Semi-finalist, 2007 Strawberry One-Act Festival; also OG Productions, Columbus, OH), On the Line (City Attic Theatre; Brooklyn College Directors Lab), Ice Holes (City Attic Theatre), Mimi Meets Her Match (The 52nd Street Project), and Metis (a collaboration with Marie Evelyn, presented by Analogous at the Tank and as part of the Txt Fst performance series in Brooklyn).

Other plays include: The Summer That God Paid a Visit to Hell (Hong Kong Cultural Center, Hong Kong), The True Story of Harold Tubbsman (Region III American College Theatre Festival), and A Beer Goggle Aria (Finalist, Collaboraction Sketchbook Festival, Chicago). While working at Kean University, she wrote scripts for "Union", a televised dramatic series directed by AC Weary.

Her work has been published in New Monologues for Women, By Women II (Heinemann), Monologues from the Last Frontier Theatre Conference: The Best of the 2009-2012 Monologue Workshop (Focus), and two volumes of Audition Arsenal (Smith and Kraus).

Melissa was the resident playwright and literary manager of City Attic Theatre in NYC and served as the Co-director of Dialogue as Performance of Analogous, an NYC organization committed to interaction art.

Melissa is passionate about arts education. She is currently Assistant Director of School Programs at Lincoln Center Education. She formerly served as Literary and Education Coordinator of Premiere Stages in Union, NJ, followed by a term on the company’s Advisory Board. While in New Jersey she read scripts and directed winning plays for the New Jersey Young Playwrights Festival. She has taught at New York University (where she's currently on faculty), Ohio University, Kean University, the Ohio Educational Theater Association, the New York State Theatre Education Association and New York Educational Theatre Association, and in schools in New York, New Jersey, Japan, and Peru. She is currently completing her PhD in Educational Theatre at NYU, where she is the Ella Mae Mullavey Ader Fellow.